Selected Moments of the 20th Century

1982

Against the expectations of the Educational Testing Service, students of
Bolivian teacher Jaime Escalante pass calculus exam twice

What happened in 1982 in an inner city school in East Los Angeles where Bolivian
teacher Jaime Escalante was teaching math was perceived by many people as either
a miracle or a major fraud. For the first time in the history of the school, the
majority of the students who wrote the exam passed the advanced placement
calculus examination, an important requirement to go onto higher education. This
was totally unexplainable to the experts of the Educational Testing Service (ETS),
who suspected that a major cheating scam had taken place during the examination
as previously, year after year, students from Garfield High School had
overwhelmingly failed that particular test. Had the children been from an upper social class, or had the
school been located in a wealthier neighbourhood, the educational experts would
have been unlikely to raise any suspicions, but these were poor Latino students, and the school was located in a poor area of the city with
high rates of criminality, drug addiction and prostitution. All the expectations
were that these students were going to fail once again, but this time they passed. Whether or not they passed without cheating was a big
question that could only be answered with a new test, or so the ETS claimed.

If they had known the work of teacher Escalante during the previous years in
that school, they wouldn't have been so surprised. Jaime Escalante had started
teaching in Garfield in 1976, after arriving in the United States without speaking English and without an official teaching degree (although he
had taught mathematics and physics in Bolivia during his youth). At Garfield, he
worked hard with the students to help them understand mathematical concepts and the importance of discipline, and, most importantly,
to start believing in themselves, in their own intellectual capacities as human
beings. In a context marked by high levels of prejudice and discrimination
against poor Latinos, that was not an easy challenge. In their book Pygmalion
in the Classroom, published in 1968, Robert Rosenthal and Leonore
Jacobson had clearly shown the great impact that teachers' expectations have on
students achievement. At the same time, however, the film The
Blackboard Jungle, released in 1955, had shown that, in spite of
negative societal and institutional expectations, sometimes a single teacher who
believes in the learners and who respects them can make a difference. This was
the case of Jaime Escalante, who at the same time was a demanding teacher, a
counsellor, or a friend, depending on the student and the circumstance. The
students did well in the exam because somebody finally believed in them, they
believed in themselves, and they prepared themselves to succeed by working hard
as a group. The success of the Garfield students was difficult to believe by
those who endorsed the genetics of IQ or the determinism of cultural deprivation
theories.

In any case, the students were demanded to take a new test. That was
clearly perceived as unfair and discriminatory by the students and their
teacher, but the authorities were so distrustful and so sure that some type of cheating had taken place, that another exam was finally imposed. It came
as a great triumph when students not only passed again, but this time performed
even better.

The story of Jaime Escalante, Garfield High School, and the young students
teaches many lessons on structural discrimination and the power of agency to
overcome it. It is an inspiring story that, in the same way that the exam as taken and retaken, must be told and retold. A few years later, under the
direction of Ramón Menéndez and the performance of Edward James Olmos as
Escalante, the acclaimed movie Stand and Deliver
contributed to tell this story to the rest of the world.